A Short History of Science and
Religion
~ by Ernie Stokely 9-25-2007
The Ancient World
We in the West have been taught that all
of the science we have today was developed by the Greeks. Through work
in the last 50 years we now know that we owe almost all of the roots of
modern science and the roots of Greek science to developments in India,
China, and the Arab lands, developments that predated the Greeks. The
Greeks did indeed carry forward many of the ideas and laid the foundations
for our modern philosophy, physics, metaphysics, and mathematics, but
they already had learned much from the world surrounding Greece.
For example, Babylonian mathematics in
3000 BCE ("before common era", or more
commonly, "BC",
or "before
Christ") had
developed a number system, or a "place system," based on the
base 60. Our modern number system is based on 10 (the decimal system).
Around 2000 BCE the astronomers of Mesopotamia used tables with squares
of numbers, a system that came much, much later in the West. In 1800 BCE
the Egyptians used equations to deal with food distribution. Even the
earliest recording of the creation story came from India around 2000 BCE
and was recorded in the Rig-veda, which evolved into Hinduism. More about
the contributions of the non-Greek scientists can be found in the paperback, Lost
Discoveries, by Dick Teresi.
The Abrahamic Genesis story was first written
down around 1400-1200 BCE (before it was oral tradition), and around 1000
BCE the Sumarians and Babylonians were
using a sophisticated algebra, millennia before algebra was introduced
in Egypt and Greece by Hero of Alexandria.
Go to the next page.
Index:
Introduction
The Ancient World
The Greek Era
The Rise of Christianity
The Middle Ages
The Rise of Science and Enlightenment
The Enlightenment by Great Scientists and Philosophers
Galileo, Newton, and Kant
Reason and Enlightenment
Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, Progressiveism
Personal Theologies of God
